The Kyra’s Hope Research Grant has its first recipient. The inaugural grant supports a collaborative project with the Gujral Lab at Fred Hutch Cancer Center to design, develop, and deploy the Rare Cancer Atlas: an open-source, AI-powered platform built to help the research community explore rare cancers through integrated data.
The problem: knowledge that lives in silos
Rare cancer research is held back by fragmented and siloed data. Molecular findings live in one place, clinical observations in another, and therapeutic evidence in a third, often in formats that were never designed to be connected. For diseases where every data point is hard-won, that fragmentation slows the search for answers.
“Progress in treating rare cancers, including childhood cancers, has been impeded by limited data. With the Rare Cancer Atlas, we aim to create an AI-powered, user-friendly research platform that brings together fragmented rare cancer data, enabling researchers and clinicians and others to generate new insights and accelerate discoveries.”
What the Rare Cancer Atlas will be
The Rare Cancer Atlas is being developed as a publicly accessible resource designed to help researchers, clinicians, patient advocates, and rare disease organizations explore integrated molecular, clinical, and therapeutic data across rare cancers. The platform is intended to support data-driven research, hypothesis generation, and scientific discovery, not for one lab alone, but for the broader research community. And because it is open source, nothing built here is locked away.
How it will be built
The project brings together three things that rarely sit at the same table:
- The Gujral Lab’s expertise in cancer biology, which grounds the platform in real scientific questions.
- TRACER’s rare cancer dataset, the data the Atlas will draw on.
- An embedded engineering team of Kyra’s Hope Fellows, who will develop the software infrastructure, data pipelines, AI-enabled capabilities, cloud infrastructure, and related research technologies within the agreed project scope.
Our commitment
As part of the initial project cohort, Kyra’s Hope Foundation anticipates contributing approximately 500 hours of engineering and AI expertise through Kyra’s Hope Fellows.
Based on the Foundation’s methodology for valuing donated professional services, this represents an estimated $150,000 to $200,000 in contributed in-kind technology expertise. Actual volunteer hours and estimated value may vary based on volunteer participation and project needs.
What comes next
As the work progresses, we will share updates here and in our impact reporting.
The inaugural grant is a first step. It is also a statement of how we intend to work: openly, collaboratively, and with the urgency that families facing rare cancers deserve.